


to be your harbor

by strikinglight



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - The Little Mermaid Fusion, F/M, Grief/Mourning, References to Depression, Suicidal Thoughts, the marianne-typical sadnesses but they're touched upon very lightly only
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-20
Updated: 2020-03-20
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:00:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23223661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: Far out in the ocean, where the waters are clear, and cold, and blue as the sapphires we mine from under the earth, it is very, very deep.A story about being alive.
Relationships: Marianne von Edmund/Claude von Riegan
Comments: 22
Kudos: 66





	to be your harbor

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nachuuki](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nachuuki/gifts).



> For Natsuki, who's gotten me thinking about fairytales again. With thanks to the wonderful folks at the writing house, for always be(ar)ing with me; with particular thanks to Gwen, for the adlibs.
> 
> The title is from [here.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTdQRtU5O_I) There is, as is my wont, [a playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/38Gda84JQBkAlIgwVOfUuW?si=ZtRV7MjCTfiH6eQiL7WFJA); I hope it's good company as you sit through this tale.

_The road which leads me to you is safe  
even when it runs into oceans._

_— Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I | Ocean_

* * *

On the islands of Brigid it’s impossible to go anywhere and not at least glimpse the sea. The air always smells of salt, mixed in with other things—grass and woodsmoke, wildflowers, earth. There is so much light in this place, even inland under the trees, glowing and golden. Claude feels almost afloat in it, dangling his legs off the edge of the pier just outside the village of Llyr, on the shores of which he and Marianne have been washed up two days now. That these shores hold them so gently is the happiest of accidents.

Their feet are in the water this morning, and he’s holding her hand, cupped loosely between both of his like an oyster’s pearl. She’s radiant when she looks at him, her whole face in the sun.

“Now, then,” he says, smiling, “what shall we do today, you and I?”

It’s the same question for every new place. Sometimes she has an answer, and sometimes not—it’s all right either way, now that they have all the time in the world, and such a lot of world to see, just the two of them.

Some days—like today, it would seem—she returns the question. “What do you want to do, Claude?” And then, kicking gently in circles, watching the ripples her feet make shudder across the blue, “Do you want to go into the water?”

Claude hums, and considers the sea. How large it is out here, how absolute the way it embraces these islands. They could learn to sail here, he thinks. They could spend the whole day swimming. And there’s no denying it stirs something in him, the idea of going back to the water—something bone-deep and hungry, a longing so familiar it doesn’t even need a name. He knows the color of that longing well; he only sees it in the sky every day. In Marianne’s hair, too. Always.

“Maybe later,” he says. “For now, I think I want to tell you a story.”

* * *

Far out in the ocean, where the waters are clear, and cold, and blue as the sapphires we mine from under the earth, it is very, very deep. So deep, in fact, that no lengths of rope you thought to unravel could ever touch the bottom. Not even all the houses in a great city, were you to take them and stack them one atop the other, would break the surface from the ocean floor. Now, for years upon years human beings in their ignorance have imagined nothing of particular interest down there—just darkness and seaweed and bare, white sand, but this is simply not true. Flowers and trees grow there, of a kind and color it’s impossible to find on land, with stems and branches that sway back and forth in the current so gracefully they seem almost alive. Fishes large and small glide between them, in much the same way as the birds of the air do among our trees. These depths are where the sea-king and his subjects live, in glistening houses made all of coral and amber and mother-of-pearl; the sea-king’s palace stands in the deepest reaches, with high, stately windows and a roof of shells, and no castle like it has ever been built in the world above.

The sea-king and his wife loved one another very well. There were many curious tales about his queen, including some that she had been an earthbound princess, and that she had grown so utterly bored of life on land that she fell in love with a man of the sea and went down into the deep to live, without ever looking back. Whatever the truth of this may have been, certainly she was a very clever woman, well-versed in the ways of the surface-world—bold, and resourceful, and deserving of very great praise, for she ruled wisely and well at her husband’s side, having exhausted her youth’s share of grand adventures.

Two sons she had with the sea-king, and a daughter between them; bright and beautiful children, the delight of all the kingdom. The elder prince was dutiful and fair and serious, and had devoted himself from boyhood to learning all he could about his father’s kingdom and the scope of rule. The princess, by contrast, was something of a free spirit—which is to say she was better than anyone at finding some pretense or other to skip out on her own royal duties, but she had a deft hand for making jewelry, and a keen eye for all things fine and beautiful, and a smile of the kind that could illuminate a room, and between all of these things she erased nearly all her little transgressions with ease. And the younger prince, well. You might say he had many virtues, foremost of which was a silver tongue. A love of words, and faith that words had power. Word round the reefs was that the youngest sea-prince could talk the fangs off a barracuda, and perhaps he might well have, for all we know.

All day long the sea-king’s children played about the halls of the castle, and tended the gardens, and led the dancing in the great hall, but it was not long before the eldest prince lost himself in the study of kingship under his father, which was a burden he insisted was his alone to bear, and one his sister and brother would never know. Meantime, the two ran wild, exploring the wrecks of sunken ships and bringing back all sorts of strange oddments and souvenirs, speculating what use these objects possibly had in the human world. From time to time their brother would indulge them enough to sit with them and share with them what he knew—this tiny silver trident was for maintaining hair, that bulb on the end of a long spout for playing music—and they all thought the human world rather funny, that they should make so many trifles for so many bizarre purposes. And once in a rare while even their mother the queen could be persuaded to tell them stories of the surface-world, the world she may or may not have come from, a century past—of the sun and the sky, the harbors and the towns, the people and the animals.

“When you are older,” said the queen, “when fifteen years have come and gone since the day of your birth, you will have our permission to rise up out of the sea, and you will see all the things I have told you of.”

The three siblings had made a promise to one another that, when the time came for each of them to go to the surface, they would return with tales of all the wonders they had seen, but neither of the older two longed for it as much as the youngest, he who had the longest time to wait but also the greatest hunger. Many nights he sat on the roof of the palace, gazing up at the silvery light of the moon shimmering down crookedly into the water. On such nights he would watch especially for big black shadows passing overhead, knowing them to be either whales or ships full of people, who never imagined that there might exist a world so far below them that they would never get to see.

And so it came to pass that the eldest prince turned fifteen years of age and made his journey, and when he returned he had hundreds of things to talk about; but the most beautiful thing, he said, was climbing the rocks off the coast at moonrise, and gazing far off at what appeared to be a large city, where the lights twinkled all through the night like hundreds and hundreds of stars. Because he had keen ears, too, so much of its music drifted out to him on the wind—the lively bustle of so many carriages coming and going, so many church bells tolling the hours, so many human voices raised in chatter and song. Of course, he amended somewhere in the middle, it wouldn’t have been much more than a little hamlet compared to their great kingdom under the sea, but even he could not deny that human settlements had a certain quaintness about them that made them charming, and he should like to see it again someday, when he had the time. The youngest prince listened eagerly to everything that he had to say, and afterwards when he sat as usual on the roof gazing upwards through the dark blue water, he thought of this town that his brother had thought so quaint, with its lights and its bells, and fancied he could hear their chimes echoing down, down into the deep.

Their sister was less adventurous—she was, to tell it true, quite lazy—so when she rose to the surface the year after she opted simply to float in the middle of the sea and to gaze up at the clouds, which with their long trailing wisps looked like great gulls on the wing. She said that in its own way could be one of the most beautiful things she had ever seen, that she could see for miles around in every direction—the sky bending above her like a bell of glass, the light-drenched beauty of the distant ships passing, how when the sun began to dip down in the west it turned the whole sky to gold. The princess said that of all the things she had seen only the sunset was so magnificent it made her swim, to the west, closer and closer to the bright red rim of the horizon. But before she could reach it, the sun sank into the ocean and vanished.

For all the delights and curiosities of the world above, soon enough the prince and princess found themselves preoccupied again with their own; it was not long at all before he began to busy himself again with his studies, and she with her jewels, and as the months passed they each said their lives must undoubtedly be happier down below, more fruitful, more wonderful. And their silver-tongued brother looked at them disbelieving, unable to understand their contentment, and thought the days until his own birthday could not pass fast enough. Perhaps he already had some inkling that, when the time came, he would go up through the water, break the surface, and discover something that made him never want to leave.

* * *

When at last the youngest prince’s fifteenth birthday came, his mother roused him early and adorned his wrists with rings of beaten bronze, twined a rope of pearls around his head as she had his brother’s and sister’s, scrubbed his golden fishtail with sand until the scales gleamed—and the young prince thought all this ceremony quite ridiculous, and told her so.

“You are grown-up now,” said his mother, “and you really ought to wear your position with pride. I dress you up so finely because it’s the way of things, and because all who see you on your way to the surface must be reminded of your high rank.”

“But, Mother, it stings,” he objected, even if only for the sake of being contrary. “And isn’t there enough of me to be proud of without all this frippery?”

“Pride must suffer pain,” replied the queen, solemnly, but her eyes were laughing as she rearranged his pearls to one side, then the other. “More importantly, it would not do to forget where you come from, and where you will go home.”

 _Where you will go home._ That made the young prince hold his tongue for once, as only his mother’s words could. He bowed his head and allowed her to kiss him on the brow, and said only, “Farewell,” and rose airily as a bubble to the surface of the water, and it is more likely than not that every creature he passed on the way averted its eyes, how he glittered so.

The sun was just shy of rising when he emerged, and through the glimmering dawn the last of the night’s stars hung low in the sky. The sea was calm, the air sweet and summer-warm; a long way off he could see where the water curved inland into a bay, and the ships still asleep in the harbor, leaning together at anchor. Beyond lay the sketched outline of a town—not a grand city, but an unassuming little port town hemmed in on the inland side by forests and hills. And because he was bold, and curious, and did not know any better, the sea-prince swam toward land, closer and closer, closer even than his brother had gone those years ago, until he found himself within sight of the shore.

So early in the morning, the beach was still, deserted but for one young girl who came down a narrow road that wound down from between the cliffs. She was riding a peculiar creature, with a shaggy mane and four long spindly legs, and the sea-prince ducked behind a rock to watch them from a safe distance. The girl’s hair, he noted, was the color of the sky, or of the water’s surface when the sun broke through, and she had dark, dark eyes—thoughtful eyes, eyes full of secrets. She was the first human the prince had ever seen in the flesh, and he almost thought he would be content were she to remain the only one; he thought everything about her so beautiful. And while the beast that accompanied her was less so, in his private opinion, there was beauty too in the way she led it tenderly onto the sand, and spoke to it in a gentle voice, though it was so soft the words hid themselves behind the lapping of the waves on the sand, and the sea-prince could not catch them.

What was the girl there to do? Not much of anything, that first morning. The sea-prince did not see her sing or dance, as he had heard humans liked to do, but he watched her walk her mount up and down the shoreline, gazing out at the water, waiting for the dawn to come. When at last the sun did rise, it cast her entire face in a rosy light that made it glow, and the prince was so startled by this that he dove under the water for a moment to collect himself, and when he rose again it seemed as if the whole world had begun to shimmer, likewise, softly golden around the edges of everything. On the cliffs, the bells in some distant church began to ring, resounding through the air.

Something about the sound seemed to jolt the girl; the sea-prince saw her lift her head, as if remembering something, and all of a sudden she mounted her beast in one smooth motion, and together they set off again up the road between the cliffs. But he noticed something glittering had fallen from the throat of her gown, not so far at all from the place where the waves broke upon the sand; it was only when she was out of sight that the prince swam close enough to look and found it, a silver pin in the shape of a peculiar flower, with spiraling petals. He knew it would probably be prudent to leave it, in case she missed it and came looking for it later, but even as he thought this he found that his hand had closed around it of its own accord, refusing to let it go.

The girl did not come back to the beach all that day, though the sea-prince lingered all morning watching the shoreline on the off-chance that she might. In the afternoon he swam along the rim of the bay, counting the ships and studying the town, and when the time came to return below he showed the brooch to his brother, who decided then and there to go on a ramble about how surface roses were the most utterly unpleasant flower, so pungent in their fragrance and with such thorny stems, and so quick to die—nothing like the flowers beneath the sea, which bloomed sweetly year-round.

“That’s a pretty souvenir you have there,” said their sister, leaning over to take the rose from the youngest prince’s hand, turning it around and around in the blue slanting light of the undersea. The light caught against the silver and bent back, casting tiny beams across her face. “Is this the most beautiful thing you saw?”

“Oh, no,” he said, but neither did he say what it was, and he would not say it, even if she prodded him all night long. It seemed then that he had found the second thing with the power to still his tongue: a girl with hair the color of the midday sky, who was now his secret to keep, even as he wondered if he might see her again without delay.

It was not every day the sea-prince could go to the surface to look for the sky-girl, but as the summer days melted past he learned the places and times of day he was most likely to find her—in the early morning or the early evening, on the beach with her four-legged beast, or at the harbor in town, gazing out at the sea like she was searching the horizon for a sign of something returning. More than once—far more than just once—he thought he might like to ask her what she was waiting for, or even simply to say hello and to ask to be friends, but all he did was sit and watch her, concealed behind a rock or under a pier.

Autumn came, and the winds changed. Now, on some days he would see her go hand in hand through the town with two older people who must have been her parents—a lady with hair like hers, and a tall man with an easy laugh, and the sky-girl would smile then, like them coming home to her was the only thing that could make her smile. Once he saw them swimming, and once he saw them riding, and once he saw a great festival in the town at which she and her parents danced a long time around a roaring fire, and once he watched her see them off in a tall ship that glided as though on wings out of the harbor, and as it vanished over the horizon she stood on the pier and gazed after it until it was long out of sight. The sea-prince watched all these things and stowed them away in his memory next to the image of her thoughtful eyes, wondering if this was what the sky-girl’s happiness looked like.

* * *

The last time the sea-prince saw the sky-girl—or, at least, the last time for a long, long time—was in his seventeenth year, at the mouth of what would be a long and solemn winter, on a day that looked like it was on fire.

The storms of fall had come and gone, and for half a moon now he had not been able to go up above as he would have wished. On the first clear day in weeks, when the currents had calmed and the sunlight begun to filter steadily down again, he looked up from where he was tending his garden and made to rise, except that just as he came within sight of the surface a ship passed overhead, casting a long shadow, and remained in place, afloat in the middle of the water instead of going on its way. Now it was only natural that the sea-prince, whose curiosity had not waned with the years but only grown, would take an interest in this, and he swam higher to see what it was all about.

He surfaced to the sight of a tall galleon with black sails, and the most somber music he had ever heard issuing forth from it—one lonely fiddle, slow and strident as the sound of someone weeping, and when he swam closer and peered upward he saw the sky-girl standing at the prow by the side of a man he had never seen before, whose face was so severe it looked almost chiseled from stone. She was dressed in black that day, and her face was wan even in the firelight of the setting sun, and her long hair had been braided away from her face and coiled around her head like a crown. The sea-prince wondered to himself if it felt as heavy as it looked, to wear one’s hair piled so atop one’s head, and that perhaps bearing the weight of it was so painful she could not bring herself to smile, not even a little. That perhaps if she let it loose as the wind blew by, she might smile again—and yet, somehow, he doubted it.

The sky-girl was holding a basket of white roses in her hands, dropping them into the sea blossom by blossom, and as she did so such a great wailing erupted from behind her as to drown out the fiddling entirely, and the sea-prince had never heard so much grief in a sound before, not even in the songs of the whales as they swam away for the winter, seeking warmer waters. It sent a chill deep down into his bones, so deep even the colors of the sky did nothing to warm him, and he slipped right back down into the silence of the undersea, and did not again emerge. All he could see from below were the sky-girl’s roses, breaking apart on the red-tinted waves, so small and so fragile, until there was nothing of them left.

This was when the sea-prince, who had always been so fond of human beings and of the world that seemed at every turn so much larger than his own, realized there was no end to the things he wished to know, and this thing in particular that he had seen made his heart ache in ways that he had never felt before. And because neither his sister nor his brother could answer his questions, he went to find his mother among the wild oysters, for she knew more about the human world than anyone else, who may have been a daughter of that world once long ago, in a time that passed more and more into legend with each day.

“I saw a ship with black sails,” he said to her. “And flowers in the water. I heard the people aboard crying, like the gulls before a storm.”

“Humans beings die, just as we do,” said his mother, gently, as she filled his hands with the pearls she had been gathering and reached down for fresh ones. The oysters opened to her touch readily, their shells blooming. “And the term of their life is much shorter than our three-hundred-odd years. Death causes them great pain, not only because their lives are so short but because there are so many things that can kill them—famine and war and disease, and such storms as ravage the surface-world from time to time. Those wrecks you and your sister love so much to explore, for instance; those were human ships full of sailors once, except that the sea itself sank them, and they drowned, and were no more. No doubt those sailors had people who missed them, who wailed aloud in the same way when they heard that they were gone.”

“But can the dead hear them weeping?” asked the sea-prince, unsettled by this thought. In his mind’s ear he could hear these voices all too well, calling and calling out for someone who would never return. “When people die, do they not turn into foam on the waves, as we do?”

“Those left behind believe the dead can, my son,” answered the queen. “Humans believe they have spirits that live forever, and when the body dies and rejoins the earth their souls ascend into the heavens, beyond the stars, where they watch over those who remain behind. Or so they tell themselves, as a kind of comfort, seeing as none have ever returned from beyond to confirm that this is true.

“Don’t let it grieve you, dear one,” she added when the sea-prince did not answer, lost as he was in the contemplation of human beings and their immortal souls, and of truths that were not for the living to know, no matter how much they wanted it. They had begun now to swim back up the long road home, hands full of pearls his sister the princess would later string into long glittering ropes. He already knew he would look upon them and think of tears, and think of stars. “This is one of many reasons we feel ourselves happier and much better off here under the sea; we have so many more years with those we love, and when we lose them they are all around us, still, and when we are out of time we can rest ourselves all the better.”

The sea-prince was unsure if he could say that it grieved him, exactly—he could say only that he could not stop thinking of the flowers, and of the sky-girl’s ashen face, and of her silence so unshaken by that mournful song, and all that night he found he could not sleep for thinking about how much he feared she would never smile again. He surfaced at dawn the next day to search the beach for her, but she did not appear that day, nor the day after, nor the day after.

* * *

“It was years, you said?” asks Marianne, wide-eyed. Her voice has gone small—no more than a little thread of a whisper Claude imagines he might wind around his fingers, stow away in his pocket and keep. It’s barely an interruption at all.

“Five years, yes,” he says—smiles again, even if these parts of the story are sad. All stories worth their salt go this way, he’s always thought; like the waves, with crests and troughs. “Is it so hard to imagine a man of the sea might be so patient?”

That seems to give her pause. She looks away from him, down into the water where her feet disappear. She listens to it moving, breathing away softly, all around them.

“Well, no, I suppose. It’s just hard to imagine…” The thread trails, vanishes. Claude holds his peace, and does not chase it. “Never mind, go on.”

* * *

Five years went by, and on his continuing forays to the surface the sea-prince had chances aplenty to see the human world in all seasons. He became intimately acquainted with snow, and the lightning-storms of summer, and the autumn foliage. One spring he even went up a wide river that emptied itself into the sea, swimming against the current, and saw the green hills unrolling on and on for miles around on either side, the grand houses and palaces of the landbound nobles. He heard birdsong in the forest and the laughter of children playing on the bank, and came home so thoroughly scorched by the sun that the seawater stung the skin of his face, and he thought it all very lovely indeed. And yet whenever the sea-prince returned from some adventure or other, he always found that nothing he had discovered, no matter how marvelous, could quite make him forget the one dear sight he wanted more than anything to see again—one girl with the sky in her hair, standing at the water’s edge and smiling.

When at last he did get the chance to see her again, it was because the dolphins came to him complaining of noise. He had followed a pod of them out into the open ocean to the west, promising to investigate while they continued on in search of quieter waters, and even before he saw the ship floating ahead of them he could hear the blasts from up above, like thunder but also not quite, and see lights flashing.

It was full dark above, but as he emerged the sea-prince could barely tell that it was. For a moment the night sky was bright as day, alive with more fireworks than he had ever seen before, bursting into bloom for no longer than a few seconds, and then showering down in such an array of sparks it was as if the stars themselves were falling all around, reflected in the clear, calm sea. Riding the crests of the waves he could glimpse by their light every furled sail and every coil of rope, and all the people aboard drinking wine and dancing—and, lo and behold, looking thoroughly unhappy to be in the middle of it all was a face he had not seen in many years but had never forgotten. The sky-girl stood at the rails, and the sea-prince thought she looked much the same as she had all that long time ago on the deck of a different ship, pale and weary and garbed in the same harsh black. In the center of the deck a ways behind her was a large statue in her likeness, or in something approaching her likeness: a grand lady with her hands clasped in prayer, cold as the white marble she had been carved out of.

Now, there are many remarkable things about the ocean, but to be sure one of the foremost among them is this: that out in it, everything changes so fast. As the hours grew long, late into the night, and the fireworks ceased and the music went quiet, and all that was left of the earlier merriment were the people milling about with their goblets in their hands, talking idly to one another, soon the water grew restless. As the waves rose, the ship’s sails were reefed and it began to move, slowly first and then more swiftly, as if it meant to outrun the approaching storm. While at first the sea-prince found this all pleasant sport, chasing the thrill of each new surging wave higher and higher, it was not so to the sailors, whom he could see darting about the deck with their faces white with fear, and he remembered then that humans that sank under the sea lost the ability to breathe and drowned.

At length the ship groaned and creaked and tilted dangerously to one side, the thick planks gave way under the lashing of the sea as it broke over the deck, the mainmast snapped in two like a reed. There was no doubting now that the crew were in danger; even the sea-prince himself found he had to take care to avoid the shattered beams that lay strewn about on the water. One moment it would be so pitch dark that he could not see a hand in front of his face, but the next a flash of lightning would reveal the whole scene—every surging wave, every face aboard the lone lifeboat. Immediately he noticed he could not find the sky-girl among them, and felt himself gripped by fear that she had already been pulled under, deeper and deeper, so that when she drifted down to his father’s palace she would already be quite dead.

Determined that she should not die, the sea-prince wove in and out among the debris which strewed the surface of the sea, forgetting that the shattered ship could still easily crush him to pieces. Then he dove deeply under the dark waters, until at length he managed to reach the sky-girl, who seemed to have long lost the power to swim and floated suspended, rising and falling with the waves. The sea-prince caught her in one arm and held her head above the water, and through the night he let the current drift them where it would.

By morning, the storm had ceased just as suddenly as it had come, but of the ship not a single fragment could be seen anywhere, and the prince knew that what remained of it had sunk down into the depths; it would become a home for the fishes, and a place perhaps for curious seafolk to explore, but it would never sail across the water again. When he looked at the girl he had saved, he saw the rising sun had brought the color back to her cheeks, if only a little, but her eyes remained closed, and when he put his ear close by her mouth he could feel her only barely breathing.

Presently they came in sight of land—a familiar shoreline, beyond which lay the sky-girl’s town. The waters of the bay were by now quite calm, and so the sea-prince swam with her right up to the very beach on which he had watched her walk, all those long years ago. He laid her down on the sand, in the warm sunshine, and stroked the hair back from her forehead as he sat beside her.

“I have dreams, you know, about seeing your world,” he said. “Since I was a boy I’ve thought it full of wonders, more than I could ever hope to know.”

In a short while, he knew, the bells in the temple on the hill would begin to ring. The gulls would take wing from their nests in the cliffs, preparing to feed. The town would awaken, house by house, and perhaps someone would come down here searching for her. But before the bells, before the gulls, before the arrival of the unknown someone, he would be by her side here, talking the minutes away.

“When I look out at the sea from the surface like this,” he went on, “I remember how big it is. You forget that sometimes, down below, when it’s all around you. But seeing it this way makes my dreams feel small, and that makes me wonder if I might find some way to make them come true.” He looked down at her, and smiled to see that she had begun to breathe more deeply, with solid ground under her back. “I wonder if there’s anything you want in this world. If you wished for anything at all, no matter what it was, I would help you win it if I could.”

The sky-girl did not wake to answer, but she did begin to stir. At that moment the sea-prince heard at a distance the whinnying of her four-legged creature, and heard the voice of a man raised in alarm. He had no choice then but to dive back down into the water and return to his father’s castle, though he wanted nothing more than to see the sky-girl open her eyes and ask her, face to face this time, about her dreams.

* * *

There were many questions waiting for the sea-prince when he arrived home, about where he had been and what he had seen, but he who had been so joyful and so inclined to chatter of the sweetest and most idle kind was grave and thoughtful now, and very little could shake him from it, though many tried. It was true he applied himself to his daily tasks with as much diligence as ever, but he moved about enrobed in such pensive silence it was clear his mind and heart were elsewhere. The strangest thing of all was that he was never more silent than when he swam out to explore the newest of the wrecks with his brother and sister; in truth, he did little more than sit and contemplate the statue of the human woman that they had found half-buried in the sand of the sea-floor.

He would not have said he loved her, then. Or perhaps it was that before he could permit himself to love her, he had to love the world. It seemed so much larger than the one he knew, and he wanted nothing more than to wander its farthest reaches with her—travel across the sea in ships, mount the high hills, explore the woods and the valleys. There was so much he wished to know about the lands beyond the shoreline, and about the many thousands of people, and about so much that stretched far away out of reach of his sight; he found it agonizing that human beings should have such a world and so little time to enjoy it all, remembering what his mother had said about the ways they could die.

“Do you think,” he said to his sister as they made their way out of the wreck one day, “one of the seafolk might gain a pair of legs and walk on land as humans do? Do you think that, say, I might do such a thing, if I wanted?”

“I don’t see why you would ever want that,” she replied—which was not an answer to his question, but that was her way, for better or for worse. “You’d be a fool to give away that golden tail of yours, which is only the most beautiful in the seven seas, even if no human would ever say so. They don’t know any better, walking around on those two sticks of theirs—what do you call them? Legs? Those legs. They think themselves so very handsome to have them, but to me they’re just funny-looking.”

“But suppose I wanted to see the world,” said the sea-prince. “There is so much world, sister, and it’s true the seas are a large portion, but they are still only one portion. Aren’t there tales that tell of an ancient age when the seafolk changed form and went freely among the humans, and vice versa?” Ducking down under an especially low-hanging beam, he added, “There are legends about our own mother that say she was a princess from the world above who loved the sea so much she married it and never looked back. Why could it not be the other way around?”

“They say such things only happen by magic,” she said. “And for that you’d have to go to the sea-witch who lives in the forests out past the reef to the west. That is what they say our father did when he went to seek our mother’s hand in marriage, though neither of them will confirm or deny it now. For all we know, she could only be a legend.”

The thought remained in the sea-prince’s head all that day, and long into the evening when he sat at the supper table with his family, until it made his heart quite calm, and his mother and father remarked on what a relief it was to see him acting like himself again. The prince lifted his head high, the better to act the part of himself, and talked with them for hours of flowers and dolphins and the calf he had saved from the pull of the undertow, and thought to himself that at the darkest hour of the night he would go alone to see the sea-witch with his own eyes, and seek her counsel and her help.

And so it was that later that night, when the sea-king’s household lay abed and dreaming, that the prince crept silently out of his father’s palace and took the road leading west through the reef, to the foaming whirlpools past which the sorceress was said to live. He had never been that way before; neither flowers nor trees grew there, only a feathery, ghostly grass that covered the ground in long swathes stretching toward the whirlpools, where the water whirled round and round around everything it seized and cast it down into the fathomless deep. Between these pools the sea-prince needed to pass, and into the forests beyond. In the center of these stood the sea-witch’s house, made of dead coral and human bones and whatever else could be salvaged from the shipwrecks that dotted this part of the deep. As he swam the sea-prince found himself just a little afraid of all he saw, how dark and empty these shadowy regions of his father’s kingdom, and of how the kelp seemed to reach out for him with a will of its own, but he smiled to himself to keep the fear at bay, and talked to himself the whole way through about nonsense things, and eventually his courage returned.

The door to the bone-house creaked open at the prince’s touch. At a desk in the center of the room within sat the witch, writing in a scroll by the light of a clusterwink snail, with a black and white sea-snake twined about her shoulders for company. In the hearth there hung a bubbling cauldron, full near to the brim with a mixture that glowed faintly green, illuminating the rest of the house.

“Oh, my,” the prince remarked before he could stop himself. “Somehow you’re far younger than I was imagining.” Soon he was grinning, despite himself—for real this time, rather than as a test of courage. “And smaller, too.”

“You ought to show some respect if you mean to come around people’s houses begging for favors,” snapped the sea-witch, for whom the prince would later learn the matter of her apparent age was quite a sensitive topic. A thousand years to the day she had lived upon the earth, you see, sustained by magic in an unchanging form. “I know what you want, and it is very stupid of you, and it will only bring you sorrow, but you’ll have your way, prince. You want to get rid of that beautiful golden tail of yours and have instead the two stumps that human beings call legs, that you might walk about the earth and win the love of your human girl with the sky in her hair.”

“How do you know all that?” asked the prince, curiously, so deeply impressed in spite of himself that it overtook the alarm he felt at seeing his heart’s dearest wish laid so bare. “Do you have eyes in the sky as well as in the ocean?”

“It is my business to see all, and to hear all. The how of it is not for you to know,” said the witch. “I know so many things that you don’t know. Human beings are fickle and fragile, and they know how to do nothing better than fight one another. They breathe dust, and eat the plants growing out of the ground like beasts. Do you really want to live among them?”

“I would like to at least try,” he said. “If they’re as dull as you claim, I want to be able to ascertain that for myself.”

The sea-witch, if anything, seemed all the more vexed by his certitude. The end of her silvery tail cracked like a whip against the floor, and she huffed out a breath so deeply it seemed to take all the air out of her body. “You ought to think on it more carefully. The choice of a new world to live in is one that is made for life. When you assume human shape, you can no longer live beneath the sea. You will never return through the water to your sister and brother, never see your father’s palace again, and if you do not win the love of your sky-girl after the turn of one moon, so that she is willing to forget all she knows for your sake, and to see the world with you, and to love you with her whole soul such that it comes to dwell in both your bodies, then you will die. When dawn breaks over the sea on the first day of the next moon, your heart will break into pieces and you will become foam on the crests of the waves.”

“I will do as you say,” said the prince, still smiling, even if his heart had begun to beat twice as fast in his chest—even if you would not know it from looking at him.

“You will have to pay me, of course,” added the sea-witch. She had already begun to mix up her potion in the cauldron, taking down bottles and boxes from her shelves, tossing in a pinch of something here and a fistful of something there, stoking the glow brighter and brighter. “And for such a steep request I can’t possibly ask you for a trifle. I will need that silver tongue of yours, my prince—you have the sweetest words of any creature that resides under the sea. They are the delight and the downfall of all who cross your path, and no doubt you seek to use them to charm this girl of yours. But only the best thing you possess must you give to me, do you understand? Nothing but your voice will do.”

“But if you take away my voice,” the prince protested, “what will I have left?”

“You’ll still have that charming little smile of yours, will you not?” the witch pointed out, with a crooked brow. “And two eyes, and two hands, and two feet that you can teach to dance easily enough—human dances are nothing terribly complicated. Surely between all of those things you can contrive a way to ensnare the heart of one girl. Well, have you lost your courage? Let me take my payment, and you’ll have your wish in return.”

In the end, he did not so much as hesitate. “So be it.”

“You are a fool,” she sighed, but all the same she pricked herself and let a few drops of her blood fall into the bubbling cauldron, and in the steam that rose from it the prince thought he might see visions of the human world as he had never seen it before—immense fleets of ships, armies locked in battle, the silhouettes of girls dancing. But when at last the smoke cleared and the witch distilled the potion into a bottle it looked like nothing remarkable at all, only the clearest water.

“Here it is for you,” she said, and then she laid her hands upon the prince’s throat and pulled from within it a sphere of golden light, glistening between her fingers like a star, and after that the prince found it was true indeed that he could no longer speak, nor laugh. The light she stored on her desk, in a nautilus shell that sat next to the clusterwink snail, and it glowed there as if to brighten her whole house, its own little sun.

“Go quickly,” she told him. “You must drink this before dawn. It’s going to be very painful, you will feel a sword slicing you in two, and there is nothing—do not hold it against me if you have regrets.”

Before he left the little witch’s house of bones, the sea-prince could not resist bowing to her, as before a dance, and kissing the back of her hand in gratitude, for he could sense that she was very lonely and deeply perplexed by the sorts of foolish things that took root in the hearts of mortal folk. And before she could hex him in retaliation he grinned at her one last time and departed, passing swiftly through the forest from whence he came—past the whirlpools, over the ghost-grass. He continued on without pause past his father’s palace without looking back, lest it break his heart, and swam up and up through the dark blue water, following a path he now knew better than the shape of his own hand.

In an out-of-the-way corner of the sky-girl’s beach under the risen moon, the sea-prince drank the witch’s potion—and indeed he felt at once that a sword was slicing through his body, one swift cut from top to tail. He fell into a faint, and lay like one dead all through the night.

* * *

When the sun rose the next morning and shone over the beach, the sea-prince awoke to a familiar voice hissing, “Wake up, you idiot, wake up!”

He opened his eyes and found his sister was there beside him with a sheet of ragged sailcloth in her hands, looking livid—but there were also tear-tracks down her cheeks, and the sea-prince’s heart swelled to see her even if he could not say a word.

“Oh, brother, little brother, my stupid little brother,” she fumed as she wrapped him in the cloth, which was quite damp but at least covered his whole body, and as the sea-prince figured he should have the decency to cast his eyes down and allow himself to be scolded he saw that he did have a pair of human legs in lieu of a fishtail after all, just as the witch had promised. “Mother and Father are going to gut you alive, but first they will gut me—oh, little brother, how could you be so foolish? Couldn’t you have kept your head out of the clouds and in the water where it belongs?”

The sea-prince could not help but lift an eyebrow at her then, as if to say she was one to talk, and she took his meaning readily enough, for she went on, “But yes, you’re right; there’s nothing for it now, I suppose. What’s done is done, and I know you, I know you mean to see this through to the end…” She sighed, deeply, dashing at her cheeks with the back of one hand, and glared at him. “I’ll do what I can to help you—what kind of big sister would I be if I didn’t—but I don’t think it will be much. For now, clothes. And then later we’ll see about all the rest. You understand?”

The sea-prince could not very well have told his sister that he did not understand, or at least not completely, so he simply nodded his head once, and let her take his face between both of her hands, as if she meant to memorize its shape.

“One last thing,” she said, and unpinned from the lengths of her lovely hair the silver rose he had brought back from this very beach, so many years past. This she pressed into his hand, and curled his fingers around it as tight as they would go. “I will come to see you at midnight, when I can. It might not be every day, but I’ll try. Meantime, you keep yourself safe, all right? I can’t very well tell you not to be reckless… but also try not to be reckless. For your poor sister’s heart, please.”

The sea-prince nodded his head again, and at that his sister flung her arms around his neck and embraced him, briefly, before darting back down into the water. He could not deny in that moment that he felt an ache in his heart to see the empty hollows on the sand where she had been—not regret exactly, but surely some feeling like it, that comes of leaving behind everything you have ever known and loved, and facing the unknown quite alone.

As luck would have it—or fate, perhaps, depending on what you believe—the sea-prince did not have to wait long, for who should come across the beach toward him with the ringing of the morning bells but the sky-girl astride her beast, and she gasped when she saw him and looked quite afraid, but seemingly against her own better judgment she dismounted and ran to his side. How unsurprising, he thought to himself, that she could not find it in her to leave someone on their own, as she went down on her knees on the sand and asked him in a small stuttering voice who he was and where he had come from. But because he could not answer he merely shook his head and smiled at her, mildly and ruefully, betraying nothing of the way his heart had again begun to pound whip-quick in the cage of his chest.

In the end the sky-girl had nothing for it but to take this strange man by the wrists and help him to his feet, and lead him across the beach and up the road that wound uphill to the house where she lived under the care of the man with the stone face. That man was this region’s margrave, she explained, and he was her adoptive father, and that if nothing else he might offer the sea-prince shelter under his roof for a time. As they walked her eyes remained mostly on her shoes and on the road ahead, and her hand clutched the beast’s reins so tightly the skin went white. The sea-prince continued to watch her sidelong, and set all these small observations aside to keep.

Now, the sky-girl lived in a beautiful house—it had marble walls and a great ornate gate, and sat at the top of a cliff overlooking the sea —but it seemed to the sea-prince that for a long time no light had been allowed to enter, because the heavy drapes had been pulled over the windows and the garden was, though well-kept enough and not overgrown, completely bereft of flowers. The servants of the household seemed unused to so much activity, but also somewhat relieved, in an odd way, to be up and about; it was not long at all before the prince found himself bathed and dried and arrayed in costly-looking clothes, and privately he thought his own reflection in the mirror in the guest bedroom quite fine. The silver rose he kept pinned to the inside of his doublet, above his heart.

More importantly, he found his silence tended to encourage conversation, and so he learned what he could from the sky-girl’s young chamberlain, a soft-spoken boy with curious lenses on his nose that he seemed to need to be able to see: that the young miss had been so deep in mourning for her mother and father these last five years that she seemed only half-alive herself, and indeed that they had nearly lost her too in a terrible shipwreck no more than a moon past. It had only been in the last fortnight or so, he said, that she had begun to leave her room and go abroad on horseback again, like she once did, instead of being shut up in the chapel all day praying.

The sea-prince continued to keep close everything he did not know— _chapel, praying,_ alongside such other curiosities as shoes and clothing, and the puzzling question of why humans needed to fill such huge basins with water to clean themselves with the sea so close at hand. Things grew ever more puzzling when he came to the door of the dining room for supper, and heard the margrave and the sky-girl within, engaged in quiet conversation.

“The duke’s son has been writing to me about you,” said the margrave, as the sea-prince put his ear closer to the open door. “He says he was devastated to hear about the accident and wishes to know if he might come to see you, as soon as you feel recovered enough to receive visitors.”

The sky-girl’s voice was a quiet, trailing thread of a thing; her words were hard to hear, and harder to grasp. “The duke’s son is kind to think of me, my lord, but he knows I’m as yet undecided on the question of marriage.”

“He certainly does. As do I.” The margrave sighed. The sea-prince could hear the frown in his voice without looking for it. “But, regardless, I also know it’s high time you made something of your life. Marry or no, inherit the house or no, but you’ve mourned long enough, wouldn’t you say? I had begun to get my hopes up, seeing you up and about so soon after…”

“I am… searching for something,” said the sky-girl. “Please give me a bit more time.”

The sea-prince did not learn that day what this _something_ might be, as the discussion found itself cut short by the chamberlain’s arrival, and by the arrival of the stuffed crab they would be having for supper shortly after. He held the question close, even as he found more and more curiosities to capture his attention, such as the taste of wine and the smell of herbs and the odd instruments human beings ate with, when down under the sea they only ever used their hands. Mostly he watched the sky-girl, marking her upright posture and the delicate movements of her head as she listened to her adoptive father speak, and it well may be that she watched him, too, out of the corner of one eye—and the sea-prince did not miss the margrave watching both of them, appraisingly, from between the burning candles.

“You know, my dear,” he said, later, as he folded his napkin and the servants came to clear the plates. “Perhaps our guest might enjoy a ride in the hills, or around the town. Something in the way of a tour, so that each of you might take your minds off your misfortunes for a time. It would be good for you both, I imagine.”

“Perhaps, if he’s interested.” The sky-girl hesitated, but after a little space she turned to the sea-prince, and raised her eyes to his for the first time. _Eyes full of secrets,_ he thought to himself, because he had not forgotten. “Would you like to join me for a ride tomorrow?”

The sea-prince, facing her across the table, found he could not contain his smile. Suddenly it had become a thing that happened to him, whether he meant it to or not.

* * *

The next day, the sea-prince and the sky-girl rose at dawn, and after the morning meal went together down to the stables, where she showed him how to sit astride her four-legged beast—a horse, it turned out to be called—and how to hold on to it, and how to signal it to stop and slow down and move, as necessary. She gave him use of her favorite, the old grey gelding he had seen her ride down to the beach so often in the old days, and borrowed for herself the margrave’s bright-eyed chestnut mare, who was rather more spirited, and walked with her head high.

“He’s very gentle, and he knows these paths,” said the sky-girl, with a fondness she could not disguise, as she attached the leading rein to her grey’s bridle. “He won’t let you fall.”

The road out of the margrave’s house forked, down toward the town to the right and up into the hills to the left. They took the latter road, and soon turned off the path and into the long grass, through the groves of black pine and wild alder. The air was cold and sweet-scented, and the green boughs touched their shoulders as they passed, and in the shadows overhead the birds sang. The sea-prince turned his head back and forth to hear such sweet sounds as he had never heard the fish under the sea make, ever, and it almost seemed the sky-girl even smiled a little to see his wonder, but they did not speak much as the hours grew long and the sun rose high in the sky.

“I’d been worried that seeing the countryside would bore you,” she confessed, later, after the noontime heat had cooled, as they sat on the hillside and watched the horses graze. All around them the grass grew lush and green, studded with tiny white wildflowers that she said had no names. “I’m glad that doesn’t seem to be the case. I’m not much good at making conversation.”

The sea-prince shook his head, gesturing at his own voiceless throat, and the sky-girl almost laughed—as much as someone like her might laugh, a soft breath hidden behind a hand and nothing more.

“You don’t mind silence, then? I don’t mind it either.” She lowered her eyes to the grass, pulled her knees up close to her chin, like she meant to make herself small. This was a habit of hers, the sea-prince had noticed—dropping her eyes to the ground, and how he longed to ask her what had so captured her attention down there, when there was so much around her to look at. “I’m always on my own, so it’s quiet around me more often than not.”

This came as no surprise to the sea-prince, who could well remember all the times he had watched her from the water when they were young, waving goodbye as the ships pulled out of the harbor. He had seen her waving goodbye so many times. Now he inclined his head toward her, a question about loneliness in his eyes that she seemed to understand.

“Lonely? Maybe a little, sometimes,” she said. “My… parents traveled widely, so I got used to it. I had the horses, and the birds. They were always with me, when I was younger.”

The sea-prince considered this for a long while; how different from his own childhood among the reefs and the wrecks and the kelp-forests, where it was near-impossible to be alone, for all the vastness of the deep sea. He thought about the halls of his father’s palace, about how sound tended to echo under a roof made of shells, about how unused to silence he had been until it became a price he needed to pay—for the chance to sit on the grass beside the sky-girl and watch the spring clouds blow by. And yet he found he would have paid it gladly, however many times, to be here rather than anywhere else, doing anything else. Perhaps we might say the sea-prince learned something that day about the sorts of truths you might discover without saying anything at all, which are precious in their own way.

The sun was setting as they made their way back down from the hills, and twilight was coming down over the bay, and the silence that bent above them as they rode under the eaves of the manor gate seemed to hang in the air just a bit more lightly than before. The sky-girl’s chamberlain was waiting for them with his friend the groom, and quite readily they took the horses back to stable, leaving the two lingering on the front steps of the house, oddly reluctant to enter.

“I enjoyed today,” the sky-girl told him. “I had forgotten how beautiful the hills could be in the springtime. I used to always go riding there with…” She let the utterance trail, looking up uncertainly at the sea-prince, and something she saw in his face seemed to push her on—a little more bravely, a little more steadily than before. “Would you like to go again tomorrow? We can go other places, too, in the coming days—like back down to the beach, or if you’d like to see the town. It’s just been a while, so I would need to prepare for it… but eventually, we can go.”

The sea-prince wanted to tell her that there was nothing he would like more in all the world than to go with her anywhere she pleased, but all he could do was nod his head and press her hand briefly between his own, and smile at her. What a strange thing it was, he thought then, how much you might hope to tell another by smiling at them. And yet you might not successfully even convey the half.

“You are kind,” she said, in the flickering shadows under the porch lantern, so softly it almost seemed as if she had never meant him to hear it at all—that she had said it just to say it, for no one but herself. “You have kind eyes.”

There was something about those words, for all their quietness, that reached deep inside the sea-prince. They followed him as he went back up the stairs to the room the margrave had lent him, as he lit the candles against the gathering night. They settled warm in the hollow of his throat where his voice used to be, and made a home there.

* * *

This is the part, Claude notes, where Marianne’s eyes go far away. Out and out and out across the water, to where the horizon disappears into the sea.

“Everything all right, Marianne?”

“Yes, it’s just…” Marianne bites her lip, looks down at where their hands sit still linked in her lap—one of his now between both of hers, loosely entangled. Then she sighs, long and slow, as if to release something that grieves her. “She sounds so sad, your sky-girl.”

“Oh, she was,” says Claude, like there’s nothing in the world he’s more certain of. “Very sad, but very beautiful. Beautiful because there was a deep well of strength in her she didn’t quite know was there. She couldn’t see how deep it went, back then, but he could.”

 _Very sad._ He sees her lips move, soundlessly. _But very beautiful._ He’s accustomed himself, by now, to untangling her silences like this. She is never hard to hear, even like this.

“Do you think so?” she asks, at last. “It’s strange, sometimes, the ways people see us.”

“I might know a thing or two about that.” He grins, leans closer, doesn’t hide his delight at the way her eyes widen. “Say, when you look at me, what do you see?”

“I couldn’t tell you something like that.”

“Why not? Do you want me to start?” There are easily ten things he could say, right off the cuff like this. Easily a hundred things. “When I look at you, I—”

“Oh, Claude, don’t. It’s embarrassing.” She pushes at his shoulder until he tilts backward, away from her, but she’s laughing. Her touch is so light he barely feels it. “Please just go on with your story.”

The story, the story. Hard to believe, thinks Claude, that everything leading up to this has only been the beginning. They could lose the rest of the day to this story easily, if he isn’t careful. Maybe even tomorrow, too.

“Very well, then,” he says. “As milady commands.”

* * *

They did indeed go riding in the hills again the next day, and down to the beach the day after, and soon it came to pass that the sea-prince scarcely left the side of the sky-girl. This was something of a small miracle to the margrave’s household, who had only ever known their young mistress to recede into herself in the company of other people, always searching for ways to retreat from it as speedily as possible. For the first time in many years, it seemed that she who had all her life been withdrawn and retiring had found, in this odd, silent stranger, someone who might almost be called a friend.

The greater miracle, however, unfolded out of sight of all but the two of them: she spoke to him more and more each day. First about the world, about such things as the names of the trees and of the birds, but later on about herself as well—about her favorite places to be quiet in, and about her prayers, and on occasion even about the son of the neighboring duchy the margrave wanted her to marry, whom she had met only a handful of times but was by all accounts a spectacle of a man, with grand ideals for both his peerage and himself. And each precious little piece of herself that she saw fit to give him, the sea-prince gathered up and kept close, in much the same way as he had searched the shipwrecks on the sea-floor for treasure, once upon a time.

Each night at around midnight, the sea-prince would steal out of the margrave’s house and take the short walk down the road to the beach, walk into the water to his knees, and wait. Before too long his sister would come, or his brother, occasionally the two of them arm-in-arm with no shortage of scoldings for how much of a fool he was being and how much he had grieved them. Yet even so they came every night to see him, without fail, and each time they would ask him the same questions: had she not agreed to be his yet, did she not love him best of all? And each time the sea-prince would shake his head, thankful in these moments that he lacked the voice to tell them what they in all likelihood wanted least of all to hear—that he could no more make the sky-girl his than he might lay claim to the land, or the clouds. That all he could do was remain by her side and wonder at the countless ways she chose to speak to him, and love her all the more with every one.

The margrave came and went with the rising and the setting of the sun, ever occupied with his business, but once at the supper table around the middle of the month he stopped for them, to suggest that perhaps his daughter and her friend should like to go into town for the spring festival. When the sky-girl passed the invitation to the sea-prince, he could only look at her curiously, as though to ask if she would not like it as well as he—and after a bit of thought she said at last that she had not been into town in many years. It would likely be as new to her as it would to him, but the company, perhaps, would help them both enjoy it that much more.

The following afternoon, the sea-prince helped the young groom hitch the horses to a small coach by which he would take them to town and back. They had scarcely finished their work when the sky-girl appeared at the top of the stairs, dressed not in the blacks that she had heretofore worn every day but in a gown of blue silk and cream-colored linen, and prince and groom both felt compelled to bow their heads as she approached, even as she herself ducked her head low and demurred that her adoptive father had simply said black was no color for a festival day. And it certainly was true that the world itself for miles around seemed decked all out in splendid colors—the trees along the road more brilliantly green than ever in the sunshine, and the windows of the houses in town hung with colored ribbons, and the flowerbeds blooming.

“It’s because the days are growing warmer,” murmured the sky-girl, as she accepted the groom’s hand out of the carriage. The sea-prince followed, and together they waved goodbye to the groom as he set off back up the road to the margrave’s house—where there also would be feasting, he had assured them on the way, and no dancing to distract anyone. “Longer, too, the closer we come to summer. People often say that today is meant to celebrate the sun.”

Already the feasting-tables had been set out in the square, and already the innkeeper had begun to pour the wine. The sky-girl found them a seat on the lip of the fountain in the center, and after a moment’s hesitation she accepted two glasses, offering one to the sea-prince. He took it by the stem, and peered at her uncertainly over the rim, as if to ask, _What should we drink to?_

The sky-girl thought a moment, and said, “To the sun, I think.” And because it seemed more fitting than anything else to salute the radiant thing that had brought them down from the hills together, they drank, and the wine was sweet and sparkling and filled the sea-prince to the core with a warmth that would not fade.

They sat together awhile, watching the people milling about in their best clothes, talking and laughing, but before too long the sun began to dip low in the western sky, and the fiddlers who had all afternoon been tuning and practicing took up their instruments to play the first song meant for dancing. The square began to fill steadily, then, with couples arm and arm; the sea-prince remembered, wistfully, the stories he had heard from his mother of the dances of human beings, of the light and spirited way music moved through air without water to encumber it. He turned to the sky-girl, opening one hand to her.

“Me?” she asked, at once understanding and disbelieving. “I’m sure there’s no shortage of girls here who would be delighted to dance with you.”

The look the sea-prince gave her was clear enough in its meaning, or so he thought: that they did not have to dance, if she did not want to, but he would only dance with her or not at all.

“No, no, it’s not that I don’t want to,” the sky-girl protested, gently, laying a hand against his arm. “It’s just been a while since…” She bit her lip, looking over her shoulder at the musicians settling into position, and then back at the sea-prince. Then she let out a sigh, and he thought he saw her spine straighten, just a little. “But, well, all right, I don’t suppose there’s any harm.”

So they rose together, and moved into the square, and took their places face to face on the fringes of the crowd. The fiddlers lifted their bows. On the first note, they reached for each other’s hands, and began.

What is there to say, really, about how they danced that day in the twilight? The wondrous thing about the dancing at festivals is that it is, at its heart, a simple thing—all stamping and twirling, turning in wide circles over the flagstones. It’s a thing to be learned by listening, by doing. And while no one but the sea-prince could say how much he was learning, on these two legs that had only begun to sit right with the rest of his body, the very least that could be said for him was that he did not look at his feet, even once. You’d be hard-pressed to think such a thing even possible, with the sky-girl’s hands in his and his eyes fixed on her face, no matter how they moved.

When they grew tired—after four songs, five—they bowed deeply to one another, and broke from the crowds in the square to walk arm-in-arm toward the harbor, where they could see the boats leaning together like old men and women watching the young people have their day. The sky-girl led the sea-prince across the last pier, the one that stretched out the farthest across the water, and sat herself down beside him at its edge.

“Did you enjoy yourself?” she asked, and he nodded with such fervor it startled a smile from her—one of the bright ones, just shy of a laugh. “I’m glad. I haven’t danced like that since… well, ever, if I’m being honest.”

 _Why not?_ the sea-prince wanted to ask. It could well have been the spirit of the moment, but he was of the opinion just then that dancing must have been one of the most joyful things in the world—and that she should have it, often and in abundance, like any other joy.

The sky-girl must have seen it in his face, because she then folded her fingers together in a way that had by now become familiar. He could guess at the meaning behind it—the labor of putting words to something, of holding a thought with care before letting it go.

“It’s always scared me, that’s all,” she said. “All those people, and so many ways you can put a foot wrong. And I can be so clumsy…” He shook his head hard at this, and she smiled again. “You’re kind to say so. The fear is probably a big part of it, but I’m not so frightened with you, I find.”

Out here, with the stars coming out and lanterns being lit one by one on the anchored ships, the sea-prince imagined it must be hard to be frightened of anything. So emboldened, he tilted his head to look at her face, wondering if she might read the question in his plainly, despite the fading light: _A party like this in your town every season, and you’ve never danced?_

The sky-girl gazed back a moment, without fear, before she seemed to remember herself and lowered her eyes to her lap again. “There’s another festival like this one, in the fall, to honor the harvest. They build a big bonfire in the middle of the square. When I was younger I’d dance around it then, with my mother and father.”

The magic of it was, you see, that the sea-prince remembered that fire. He had seen its glow from the water, many times. Once or twice from under this very pier, even, so close he could all but feel the warmth on his face. If she could only know, truly, how close by he had been in those years.

“Just at that one, though,” she said. Her eyes went far away, then, for a moment, to a place the sea-prince was sure he wasn’t meant to follow. “And not since… well, you know.”

And if he tried, the sea-prince found he could remember that particular autumn, too. The lightning. The anger of the undertow. His father and brother, spears in hand, warning, _Stay close by._

“It was fall when it happened, too. They were due to come home from the islands to the north, but they never did.” Against the distant echo of the continuing music, the sky-girl’s voice had dropped almost to a whisper he had to lean close to hear. A voice for prayer and for secrets, a voice wary of treading on holy ground—and yet he found she was not hard to listen to, even like this. “I should have seen it coming. You can never tell how the tides will change, and when a storm will come, but they just loved sailing, do you know? They loved the ocean. Sometimes I still wonder if perhaps part of them believed it could never do them harm.”

 _My mother,_ the sea-prince wanted to say, _says human beings are creatures of longing. She says people who lose their hearts to the sea are a special kind of tragic—always seeking out the water, but never belonging to it._ He wanted to say, with her town at his back, and the sun-bleached wood of the pier still warm beneath his hands, _I didn’t understand it before, but now I do._

“They did love this town, too, you see—it’s why they chose to raise me here—but I always prayed and prayed that one day they would take me with them, and we’d see the world together.” Her fingers drew together more tightly; only an imitation of prayer now, those clenched hands, bloodless at the fingertips. “I still pray for the same things, sometimes, you know. To be with them again, somewhere far from here. I don’t know how. Is that strange?”

 _It’s not strange,_ the sea-prince did not say, could not say. He remembered the black sails of the mourning-ship. He remembered white roses on the waves, and her face at the prow, and wondering if she would never be happy again. _I saw you._

But because he had no words to give her—and perhaps also because some part of him felt that words would diminish what he meant to say—the sea-prince reached for the hand of the sky-girl, slowly, to give her time to draw it away again if she wanted. When she did not retract it, he held it gently, clasped between both of his own as if to protect it, for what felt like a long time. And the sky-girl, too, was silent all that while, before she curled her fingers over his and squeezed tight.

“Maybe it is strange, but so are you,” she said, at last, without letting go. “You’re just as strange as me.”

* * *

The day the letter from the duke’s son arrived was quiet. The sky was very blue that afternoon, and cloudless with the approach of summer; the sea-prince and the sky-girl were at tea with their books in the rear garden, and her cheeks had gone ruddy from the warmth as she read aloud, softly, into the silence.

The letter, brought by a messenger in the scarlet livery of the inner lands, was written on a scroll of thick parchment, and sealed with wax, and it was in the sea-prince’s private opinion much longer than a letter announcing a visit had any right to be. Still, there were pleasant words in it when the sky-girl read it to him: words about how joyful the duke’s son was to hear that she had been on the mend after her horrible accident, words about what an unparalleled pleasure it would be to ascertain that for himself towards the close of the month. Words about her beauty, too, that he had to coax her into not leaving out, nudging her shoulder lightly with his when she hesitated over the lines. Something about a face like a flower. Something about the sea herself trembling with jealousy.

“I can’t claim to know him well, but I’m told he’s always like this,” said the sky-girl, scratching lightly at one flushed cheek as she passed him the scroll. “The sort of person who does nothing by halves.”

The sea-prince thought this something of an understatement, tracing with his fingertip the elaborate flourishes on the signature—and as if she could hear his thoughts, she added, with a helpless little sigh, “The day he formally declared for me, he sent over a statue. It was—oh, don’t laugh.” That, he was certain, she could see in his eyes. “Yes, it was of me. And yes, it was as ridiculous as you imagine.”

The sea-prince had not thought it ridiculous, the night he saw it. In truth he had thought it really quite magnificent—a big, elegant thing, though he felt now as he had then that that very grandiosity suited her well in shape only and not in spirit. But for all he knew it was ridiculous now, on the sea-floor. In all likelihood the crabs had begun digging holes in the shadows it cast, and the kelp had grown wild all around it.

“My adoptive father was so delighted he threw a party that very night, on his best ship.” For a moment the sky-girl’s eyes went far away again, remembering. Her half-empty teacup sat idle by her hand. “Perhaps it’s those two who deserve each other.”

“I wonder if you will like him,” she murmured, as she poured more tea into the sea-prince’s cup, and he could not say why she would wonder this—could not even begin to guess. “Maybe he’ll make you laugh.”

The duke’s son arrived in person a sennight later, blowing in on horseback with the winds from the south. His mare was white, and his hair was long, and under the setting sun the two of them glowed all over. The whole of the household had filed out to greet him, with the margrave and the sky-girl side by side at their head, and when the duke’s son dismounted he bowed low to her and raised the back of her hand to his lips.

Supper that night was a more extravagant affair than usual. The cook had roasted a pair of pheasants she had shot that morning with her own hand, and the margrave had asked the chamberlain to take out the good wine. The candles burned low in their silver holders as the duke’s son regaled them all with tales of his doings in the inner lands. The fields there, he told them, were flourishing after the spring planting. Another of his horses, he told them, would be in foal come the new moon.

“This silent friend of yours,” he said at length, to the sky-girl—but his eyes were on the sea-prince, who in turn had decided to occupy himself with shelling a large prawn. “Is his… situation irreversible?”

“So it would seem.” The sky-girl looked first at the sea-prince beside her, and then at the duke’s son across the table as she replied, “The truth is we know very little about who he is and where he comes from, but we’ve decided he’s to be a guest in our house for as long as he wishes it. So far it seems he has yet to—to tire of my company.”

“Most magnanimous of you,” he told her. “It only behooves every true noble to extend a caring hand to those in need, but you have gone above and beyond by welcoming such a one under your roof.”

“It’s no great generosity,” said the margrave, diplomatically, from the head of the table. “His presence has been a great help to my daughter as she recovers. Perhaps it’s in staying by her side that he’s helped himself.”

“What a heartwarming notion!” When the duke’s son smiled, noted the sea-prince, he did so from ear to ear. It lit him up from the inside, like a candle, so he must have meant it. The sea-prince, who had only known him an evening, found he could not imagine the duke’s son to be the sort of man who ever said or did anything he did not mean. “Would that we might all find such healing company, in such unexpected places.”

The sea-prince thought it all very amusing to be spoken of this way, like an absent presence, or a creature incapable of understanding, but the sky-girl seemed distressed by it all, for reasons he again found himself hesitant to guess at. As the margrave and the duke’s son went down a long spiraling thread of conversation about the governance of the inland fiefdoms, and as the chamberlain came to the table with another open bottle of wine, she reached across and laid her fingertips against the back of his hand under the table, the touch delicate and brief, unseen by anyone else.

Looking back on it later, the sea-prince would have found it a bewildering experience, because he could not have said he missed being able to speak much at all before then. Odd as it might seem for someone who in his prior life had loved nothing better than words, he had found, for the most part, that he had grown accustomed to the silence. To listening, and learning, and letting the matter of who he was, and of what he was, and of what he thought recede willingly into the shadows. To being content with simply remaining nearby. And yet the duke’s son and his goldenness and his sparkling conversation had awakened in him a curious and persistent hunger that he’d thought long-settled, that he now found himself puzzling over what to do with—a desire to be known as much as to know, to be seen as much as to see, to share himself. He had thought, before now, that he’d forgotten it. He wouldn’t know where to begin.

Still, it was there. It had been there in the dining hall as he watched the candles start to drown, and as he listened to the voices around the table break against him, waves upon the sand. It had been there when he watched the duke’s son offer his arm to the sky-girl at the door, and say, still with that same open-hearted smile, that he would see her to her quarters, if she would permit it. Right then and there the sea-prince decided there was nothing for this hunger but to hide it somewhere inside, to one side of his heart, where he stowed every thought with no place to go.

“What are you doing!” his sister hissed at him from the water when he went down to the beach to see her late that night, having heard the news from the gulls. It had so infuriated her that her face was flushed all the way down to her shoulders, almost glowing in the dark. When the sea-prince reached down to poke her cheek she made a funny noise, a high-pitched, birdlike squawking that seemed to begin in the back of her nose and made its way down her throat. “Has being so long out of the water rotted your brain, my brother? Is there only air between your ears now?”

At the skeptical look he gave her, she sighed. Shot him a returning look so peevish he half-thought she meant to drag him from the rocks where he sat, back down into the depths with her. “I know you didn’t want us to come. Mother and Father said I ought to respect your wishes, but I don’t see why I should when you’re so clearly bent on being a fool to the end.” Another sigh, and another glare. “Our brother says I ought to scold you double for him. In case you’ve forgotten, you’re living on borrowed time!”

The sea-prince shrugged, taking his sister’s hand and miming putting a ring on her finger, as if to say it didn’t matter. _It’s going to happen,_ his eyes said. _If not now, then eventually._

She slapped his hand away—but without force, for all her acid tone. “Do you know that for certain? She might still choose you… or she would, if you put in a little effort not to bungle this so close to the end. And don’t you think cheeky things at me about putting in effort, young man; I know you.”

But the sea-prince only smiled and shook his head. _She_ _doesn’t know me,_ his eyes said. _What is there for her to know?_

“How could she not know you?” his sister protested. “Have you not been by her side this whole time?” She looked down at the water’s surface, scowling at her reflection—shattered the image with one swish of her rose-colored tail. Its scales, thought the sea-prince, were lovely, like the dawn. “What do you intend to do now?”

The sea-prince shrugged again, and stretched his legs down from the rocks until his feet dangled ankle-deep in the water. Down below, he knew, the blue whales would have returned from the warm waters to the east by now. His brother would have gone out in a chariot of shells to greet them, as the heir to the throne should. He realized, then, that he did not know who might be left to tend the garden they had all planted together as children, full of flowers that knew no season. He did not know how many years it would be before his brother ascended the throne and took his place as king, with the crown that had been their father’s on his head and the silver scepter in his right hand—only that he would not be there to see it, whatever happened.

Underwater, the sea-prince had learned from his time in the world above, everything moved more slowly. Sound traveled in leisurely waves. The days drifted by, marked largely by the reach and pull of the tides, and by what fragments of light managed to filter down from the surface into the shallows, all bent at odd angles. Nothing like the world above, where time passed so fast, and people and beasts alike all moved so swiftly—where each day felt at once so full and so small. So many days he had shared with the sky-girl, but also no days at all.

How peculiar it would be, he thought, to be like the duke’s son; so sure and so able to make a gift of himself, to whoever might be willing to listen. All that ground crossed in just a few hours. The sea-prince could imagine that would be the sort of man his sister would adore, if only for the amusement of hearing such a person speak, and speak, and speak.

“Well, that was a silly question, I suppose. You’ll do what you want to do. You always do what you want to do, without a thought for how other people might need to pick up the pieces.” She pushed at his knee with one hand, edging him out of his thoughts, and he smiled at her—ear to ear, betraying not a single trace of regret. “I was teasing; I know that’s not true. I know you think about everything.”

The sea-prince looked at the risen moon, and counted the minutes passing, unencumbered by water. His sister stayed beside him, chattering now and again into the otherwise unbroken quiet, until the eastern sky began to pale. And after she took his hands in both of hers to say goodbye—to sing it, almost, in a voice that refused to tremble—the sea-prince put the sea behind him, and walked back up the road between the cliffs to the margrave’s house, to which he had committed the last of his days.

* * *

These were the things the sea-prince managed to learn about the duke’s son, by the last day of spring. He loved tea with dried fruit in it best, and spoke to horses like they were people, and wanted more than anything to succeed his father as the lord of their domain. He hailed from a land far to the west and south, far from the ocean, where the hills seemed to unfurl forever along the horizon and the fields were verdant and green. He walked with his head high, and spoke in a voice that carried easily across a room, and had a way of calling the sky-girl “milady” that made her smile.

The sea-prince learned these things easily, the same way he had learned everything else about the human world—by watching, and listening, and making the most of his speechlessness. By letting people tell him things although he could tell them nothing in return. With the sky-girl occupied with entertaining the duke’s son for most of the daylight hours, he found his own day surprisingly loose, and so he saw fit to wander the margrave’s huge house and its surrounding environs in ways that only looked aimless. In truth, of course, the wandering was no less deliberate than anything he had ever done, if only to make good use of all the empty time.

“If the young miss marries him,” he heard the young groom ask the chamberlain that morning, as the three of them broke bread together in the back kitchen, “will she go inland to live? Will she be happy, so far from the sea?”

“You know I can’t speak for the young miss,” said the chamberlain, “but doesn’t his lordship seem like the kind to do anything in his power to make his spouse happy? Such things he says about his lands, and all. He’d spare no expense for her, I imagine.”

“I do wonder sometimes, also,” the chamberlain went on, pensively, as he passed the butter-dish across the table to the sea-prince, “if indeed she might like to get away from here. If she might be happy somewhere else. Far from the painful memories, you know?”

“Not all the memories are painful, though, surely? And she’d be leaving us.” The groom’s face fell as he said it, on the word _us_ —the smallest word, turned suddenly grave and all-encompassing. “The horses, too.”

“The horses she could take with her if she really wanted,” the chamberlain pointed out. “And I suppose if she missed us as much as all that she could write to us, at her pleasure. I doubt that milady would forget us, even so far away.”

 _Just so,_ thought the sea-prince, as he rose from the table to wash his hands. _Milady never forgets._

“I trust my daughter to manage her own affairs,” he heard the margrave say to the chamberlain, later that afternoon. The chamberlain had brought the margrave tea in his study. The sea-prince had happened to pass by on his way back to his room, and the door had happened to come ajar, just enough to hear the voices within. “I just wish she would begin making choices of her own, do you see? For her own sake, as much as anything.”

“If I might be bold enough to ask, my lord,” the chamberlain ventured, “has milady spoken to you at all about what she might want?”

“I don’t suspect that girl has ever allowed herself to want anything,” said the margrave, with a sigh that seemed to fill the whole room. “At least, not enough to take it, or to ask for it. Therein lies the trouble, for all that some would call that a virtue.”

 _Just so_ , thought the sea-prince, and went on his way. _Milady hasn’t a selfish bone. Milady is afraid of selfishness._

“You’ve a brave and gentle soul,” said the duke’s son to the sky-girl, on the other side of the library door. The sea-prince had stopped outside it against his better judgment, and leaned his head against the jamb to listen awhile. By then, the sun had begun to set outside the high windows behind him, and he watched his red-touched shadow grow long across the floor. “Just like that steed of yours. It could guide you in all weathers, I hope you realize.”

The sky-girl’s answer concealed itself somewhere among the crevices in the room beyond—between the books, under the carpet. The sea-prince could not make out so much as an echo of it, no matter how he tried. But he probably should not have expected anything less, from a girl who sought to hide herself nearly every waking moment. She did everything quietly, for better or for worse.

“No, it is true. You simply do not see it, but I am certain of it.” The duke’s son had a different way of speaking behind closed doors, warm and gentle as the ending day. Not so brassy. Privately the sea-prince thought his eavesdropping worthwhile just to hear the difference for his own amusement, though he could tell no one about it. “And make no mistake, milady, I should want nothing more than for you to lead a happy life. If I might do anything in my power to help you achieve your heart’s desire, you need only name it and it will be yours.”

 _Just so,_ thought the sea-prince, smiling to himself. And again he went to his way, down to the kitchens to help with the supper preparations—or disrupt them, depending on who you asked afterward. _It’s only what milady deserves._

It turned out that the matter of the sky-girl’s heart’s desire, however, was the one thing the sea-prince could not learn, try as he might to assemble it out of all his observations and overhearings. It was as if in this last fistful of days she had pulled a curtain over her head. Suddenly her smiles could mean anything. Suddenly her silences felt opaque, and he had no way of reaching a hand out to her from where he stood cocooned inside his own, to ask, _Will you be happy when I’m gone?_

“If we’re to be wed, my adoptive father wants it to be by midsummer,” said the sky-girl, that night after supper. She was seated at her dresser as she said it, taking down her hair with her back to him, and for propriety’s sake the sea-prince stood just outside the open doorway as had become his habit some nights, that he might listen to her talk. “It’s auspicious to have weddings when the days are longest. They say that couples wed around the time of the summer solstice will have the sun shine on them all year round.”

The sea-prince leaned against the doorjamb as he considered this. He remembered that his brother had seen a wedding once, when they were younger, before he had grown too preoccupied with learning to be king. He had described the shining walls of the holy temple, and the marble steps leaning down to the water where the marriage barge waited. The lady had been dressed in a white gown, with a veil over her head that rippled down all the way to the ground.

“What are they like?” The sky-girl pulled the lengths of her hair over one shoulder, untangling it slowly with a comb. Let loose, it curled like wild vines, like a lovely, living thing. He had heard her call it _impossible,_ more than once. It had grown since he first saw her—but of course it had. “Very grand, most of the time. There’s a feast after the ceremony, with music and dancing. They decorate the church all over with garlands of roses.”

The sea-prince caught her eye in the mirror, curiously. _Would you like that? Feasting, and dancing, and garlands of roses?_

“I don’t know.” She sighed as the comb caught at a tangle, paused, worried at the knot with the teeth. “I’m not certain how I feel about the idea.”

“If we went ahead with it, would you be there?” asked the sky-girl, a little later, once she had finished with her hair and laid the comb down. The candle on her table had melted down low, and begun to flicker. “Would you stay with us another season?”

The sea-prince did not want to lie, but he had no way of telling the truth. He stepped over the threshold instead, and took from his pocket the silver rose he had worn pinned above his heart every day since coming here, and laid it on her dressing table. Seven years and the depth of an ocean it had traveled to return to her at last—a final gift of sorts, in silent apology for making her say yet another goodbye.

The sky-girl gazed at the brooch, unmoving, barely breathing. When she reached across to bring it up close to her face, her hand moved slowly, as if through water. It was too old now to glint in the light, and the years under the sea had tarnished and faded it, but it well may have been that she recognized it still.

“I had something just like this,” she whispered, almost to herself. Between her fingers, the sea-prince could see the rose’s petals trembling. “A long time ago.”

 _I know,_ the sea-prince did not say. _I was there, too._

“There is something about you,” said the sky-girl, as she closed her hand over it. For a long time she let the utterance hang in the air between them, turning back to the dresser and sliding a drawer open, lost in thought. When she lifted her head again, he could not have said what was behind her eyes, watching him in the mirror. “I can’t place it. Something not of this world.”

 _So were you to me,_ thought the sea-prince, with a smile to belie whatever dangerous things were awake and astir in his heart at that moment. _Something not of this world._

Outside her window the new moon had hidden its face. From this distance, the night sky looked black as velvet and empty of all but a small scattering of the brightest, loneliest stars, heralding the end of spring.

* * *

“When the seafolk die, Claude, do they really just disappear?”

“So the stories go,” Claude says, leaning back on his hands. “They can live centuries under the sea, but, remember, they don’t have souls as humans do—so when they die, they’re gone. Returned to the seafoam it’s said they were born from, in the beginning of beginnings.”

The wood of the pier has been warm all day from the sun. Soon it will be summer, and the days will wind on even longer than this—but Claude wonders if he’d put it past these islands to always have a bit of summer in them, no matter the month. The headman’s granddaughter back in the village had told them she loved to swim in the sea year-round, and Marianne had thought this a wonderful proposition. A little fantastical, perhaps, but Marianne is no stranger to placing her faith in seemingly impossible things.

She’s tilting her head, now, down at the water, eyeing the bubbles forming lazily on the surface where the waves curl in around the posts and recede again, curl in and recede again. The current is gentle today, and the water is clear—only the faintest suggestion of foam, floating like lace on the surface. “And do you believe human souls live forever?”

“I can’t speak to whether I believe it,” he says. “But it’s a nice thought, isn’t it? Certainly it’s a thought our sea-prince was willing to risk his life for.” Except that’s not it, he decides, no more than a heartbeat later. That’s not quite the truth—and this is, no matter how it looks, a true story. So he amends, “Or maybe not. Maybe the prospect of an immortal soul was just a bonus.”

“Just a bonus?” Marianne echoes, softly. Possibly there are limits to what even she can believe. “Then what did he really want?”

“To be with her, for however long.” Claude tilts his head up to the sky as he says it, searching for shapes in the clouds. They’re scattered today—long and feathery, like horses’ tails. “That’s all.”

* * *

All was still on the last night of spring, from the shoreline to the mountains, the hush that had settled over the land barely disturbed by the breezes whispering by, out to the much warmer sea. By the faint glimmer of the stars the sea-prince could see the wisps of the clouds they carried from inland. Leaning out the window of his room to look at them more closely, he thought, _A bridal veil._ He thought, _Horses’ tails._ Soon enough it would be time to go.

The sea-prince waited until he could be certain the entire household had gone to sleep, from the margrave in his grand bedchamber to the maids in their rooms downstairs, from the birds in the rafters to the horses in their stalls—every living thing in the house but him, still awake and all alone. Once midnight passed, and he could be sure they were all abed, the sea-prince walked quick and quiet as a shadow through the halls one last time, saying goodbye. Goodbye to the room they had been kind enough to lend him, and to the library, and to the great winged staircase. Goodbye to the kitchens, and the gardens, and the courtyard, and the gate. Goodbye to the sky-girl’s darkened window, which he could still glimpse if he stood in the middle of the path to the stables and tilted his head up. His eye knew how to find it by now, instantly, even in the dark. He could feel his heart rise to it, still, even as he put it behind him.

The night was at its darkest by the time the sea-prince left the margrave’s house, and set off for the last time down to the beach where the sky-girl had found him, taking nothing with him but the clothes on his back. The wind had begun to rise, and the waves were high; under the moonless sky he could barely see them, but he could hear them, roaring where they crashed against the shore. Standing at the water’s edge in the darkness and listening to the voice of the sea he felt a fear he had felt only once before, swimming through the dark forests to the sea-witch’s house of bones, talking to himself.

How long ago, how far away all that seemed now, and yet how clearly he could remember it even so, the kingdom under the sea that had made him. There was, he told himself, nothing to fear. He would wait here for the sky to begin to change, and for the stars to go out, one at a time, and when the time came he would step unresisting into the arms of the morning tide. He told himself it would be like nothing. He told himself it would simply be another kind of returning home.

He did not hear the footfalls on the road or on the sand. Who can say now if it was the roaring of the sea or the clamor of his own thoughts that kept those from him? And yet, when the voice of the sky-girl behind him said, “Please wait,” there seemed to be no other sound worth the listening for miles around. The words themselves pulled everything in him toward them, like the tides toward the moon, and he turned to her.

The sky-girl looked like she had scarcely slept. Her breath came quick and ragged, as though from running; she had come with no horse, no fine clothes, nothing to adorn her but her riding-cloak and the rose of tarnished silver holding it closed at the throat. Her hair had spilled forward over her shoulders from beneath the hood, and both the wind and the briskness of her passage had tangled it up and undone all her hard work.

“You mean to leave us, then,” she said, without reproach. “You mean to go home.”

 _In a manner,_ the sea-prince would have said to her, had he the means. It would have been as close to the truth as it was possible for him to come, so near the end. He smiled a sad, sad smile, and lifted and lowered one shoulder, as if to convince her it was all one to him. More than anything, he only meant to cover up his traitorous heart again.

He knew that the wise thing to do would be to turn his back on her, to go into the water and swim and swim and never look back, until his body simply surrendered and the water took him, as it was meant to. But he found that he could not have moved, would not have known how no matter how much he claimed to want it; his feet seemed to have rooted themselves deep down into the sand, holding him still.

“If you must leave,” the sky-girl said to him, “there’s a story I need to tell you before you go. Perhaps this might be asking for too much, but will you listen to me just once more?”

He could have laughed at the strange, sad comedy of it—that she could face him here and not know that even now he wanted nothing more than to listen to her, that she could say as much or as little as she pleased and he would happily listen to her for the rest of his days. The sea-prince lifted his hands in a gesture of defeat, and opened them out toward her, giving her his full attention, and the sky-girl without hesitating drew a little closer, until they were standing face to face just above the stretch of sand where the water broke. She placed her hands in his, and began.

The sky-girl’s story? It went something like this: once long, long ago, a little girl was born in a coastal town. Her parents were adventurers who spent half the year finding and trading treasures in faraway lands, and loved nothing more than to sail a tall ship directly into the wind, out on the open sea. Certainly it was true that they were kind and good, and that they loved their daughter as well as they knew how, but their itinerant life was so much a part of them you could not ask them to abandon it any more than you might ask a fish to abandon its tail, grow legs, and walk on land—and so it was often the case that in the spring and summer months the child was left in the care of a relative of theirs, the margrave of that province. As you might imagine, she grew up quiet and retiring and accustomed to solitude, with only the margrave’s horses and housecats and the birds in the garden for company.

Even if she knew it would not return her parents until autumn, the girl made a habit of being close to the sea. Nearly every day, in the morning or evening, she would ride down from the margrave’s house on the cliffs to the beach below, and spend an hour or two doing not much at all. Simply walking, or talking to her horse, or watching the water. Some days she would ride to the harbor in town and do the same, and it did not matter that there seemed to be no real aim to her waiting. The only thing that seemed to matter, at the time, was the waiting itself. And yet it was also true that in her waiting the girl saw and learned a great many things—about the language of the gulls, and of the tides, and of the storms coming from far out over the ocean. She heard all the voices in which the sea might speak, remembering that once her mother had told her this was as close as human beings would ever come to listening to the gods.

To be sure, in those years the girl spoke more to the gods than she ever did to another person. Perhaps it was all she felt she could do, in her helplessness, in her loneliness: pray for slower thaws in winter and calm waters in summer, for fair wind in autumn, for flowers in spring. Perhaps she hoped that eventually the gods would tire of such an abundance of selfish prayers that they sent her parents home and made them stay forever. And perhaps it came true, after a fashion, when in the autumn of her seventeenth year some god sent a storm to sink her parents’ ship off the coast of their little town, thereby making sure they would go nowhere, ever again.

The girl, brokenhearted and all too ready to answer for her selfishness, wondered then if it would be best that she disappeared from the world entirely. In the years that followed, she shut herself up in the margrave’s house, haunting the chapel in her mourning blacks day in and day out like a ghost. Still waiting. Still praying, selfishly, because it had become the only thing she knew how to do.

 _This is a sad story,_ thought the sea-prince, squeezing the hands of the sky-girl. He could only just glimpse the faint outline of her smile before she squeezed back once, tightly, and did not release him.

“The storm I told you about before,” she said. “The one that wrecked our ship. I hadn’t gone out on the water in years before then. Looking back on it, I know I should have been afraid—but when it came down on us, more than anything, I can only remember that I was happy. Happier than I had thought I would ever be, for the rest of my days.”

She sighed as she said it. He thought he saw some of the tension in her shoulders unravel, some heavy burden he could not see coming off them inch by inch.

“I’m sorry, is that strange? In a way, it felt like all I’d been praying for. I just thought, perhaps this is finally it—if I die here, maybe… maybe somewhere beyond the sea, I can be with my family at last.”

The sea-prince heard the ache in her heart so clearly, then. A clarion-call, a bell ringing up in the mountains. He looked into her eyes, and saw the image all too clearly of that bright and terrible night. The fireworks, the shattered wood. How he had had to hold her head above the water to keep her breathing. How little he had known then, about what breathing was for.

“I’ve wondered since then why I did not die that day,” she said. “I have wondered it all these years, why I must be allowed to live… But then you came, and before I knew it, I had begun wondering it less, because all of a sudden there was too much to do with you here. I had to show you the hillsides, to show you the town. I had to relearn how to dance because of you.” Her voice shook, and her hands; she looked a step away from weeping, but the sea-prince peered closely at her face and found she was laughing instead. “All of a sudden, I was living in the world again. All of a sudden, there you were—helping me live.”

 _I love you,_ the sea-prince could not say. With no voice to carry them, the words sank into his bones—small things, curling in between his ribs and settling. _I love you._

“I won’t ask you not to leave us if that’s what you really want,” said the sky-girl, softly into the gathered darkness. So softly the waves at their feet ought to have taken the words and swept them out to sea, but the sea-prince caught them—held fast to them, and to her. “I just didn’t know how else to… to tell you what you are to me. That’s all.”

The sea was at his back now, and bending above it the sky, mirrors to each other that he could not see. For all he knew, dawn was just about to come. For all he knew it would never come.

* * *

There are many ways this story ends. In some versions, the sky-girl, having exhausted all her words, stood by the sea-prince in silence until the sun came up over the ocean, and in the end he could do nothing but smile at her one last time before he turned and walked into the water, letting the waves break upon him right before her eyes. He seemed to sink to his knees beneath them, and when they receded she could see nothing but a veil of foam on the water, already dispersing.

In some versions, the sea-prince drew the sky-girl closer by the wrists and kissed her, there at the water’s edge—a long and yearning kiss that taught him all about what drowning felt like, like he meant to take all the breath in this borrowed body and put it in her hands, all of it, until there was nothing for him left.

In some versions, it was the sky-girl who kissed the sea-prince, holding his face between her palms and breathing softly against his lips as though she had barely realized what she was doing until it happened, and the sea-prince laughed and pulled her close and whispered her name in her ear for the first time, like the beginning on a prayer.

One thing is for certain, though. When the tide of the sky shifted, and the stars sank once again behind the horizon to make way for the coming dawn, neither the sea-prince nor the sky-girl were anywhere to be found within the borders of that little harbor town. Word is that they were never seen there again, though it took no time at all before all sorts of tales began springing up in their absence, as tales are wont to do about strange places and strange people—that they had run away together, or that they had thrown themselves from the cliffs above the town into the ocean, or even that the goddess of their world took pity on them and changed them into a pair of flying fish with shimmering scales, one golden and one blue. That they spent the rest of their lives roaming the open sea together, finally free.

It’s said that to this day, should you ever travel along the coast and come upon that town, you’ll hear whispers of them still. And any version of the tale you hear, in the end, will close like this: this is not meant to be a sad story. It is, at its heart, just a story about being alive.

* * *

The days are beautiful and full of delights on the islands of Brigid, but Claude decides that nothing quite compares to the fact of Marianne’s existence in them. Possibly it’s a premature assumption, given how little they’ve both seen of the world, but he already feels like that’s safe to say of any place.

Nothing to any of the places they’ve seen, though, or those they have yet to see—the fault is all hers, and all the more because she continues not to know what she does to a place, just by being alive in it. Claude may have something of a talent for putting words to things—and that’s as modest as he cares to be on the matter, because it wouldn’t be seemly to lie—but he’s sure he doesn’t know how he might begin to explain it to her, and so he doesn’t try. When he finishes his story, he’s content to simply sit there, watching her be. Waiting, until she turns from the water and looks at him.

“What do you suppose happens,” she asks, “after stories end?”

“Excellent question,” says Claude, grinning. “And one I actually don’t have an answer for, if you can believe it. Whatever it is, I hope it’s hair-raising.”

Marianne’s eyebrows lift, in that gently skeptical way they do whenever she thinks he’s said something ridiculous but is far too polite to say so outright—but her answer, polite or no, is lost to the sound of splashing in the distance, and a shout of “Claude! Claude, you scoundrel, making your Hilda swim so far west!” They raise their heads just in time to see a familiar face poke out above the water, and the swish of a rose-colored tail, throwing up a glittering shower.

“Marianne, you might do me a favor and contain that man of yours!” Hilda calls, hands cupped around her mouth, but she’s smiling ear to ear. Even at this distance Claude can see the strings of pearls holding back her long, long hair. “Honestly, traveling so far, so fast… Are you both going to come say hello to me properly, or what?”

“If you’re going to scold so much, maybe we never will!” Claude calls back, but he is laughing too, and there’s only more laughter beneath, gathered between his ribs and bubbling up out of his throat, and he can’t stop it.

There’s nothing to the way Claude returns to the sea; he slips fully clothed from the pier into the water and finds it holds him easily, like it’s welcoming him home. When he comes back up again, he breathes and faces land, gazing up at Marianne the only way he’s ever looked at her—as though he’s seeing the sky for the first time, bending above him, unbroken and blue.

“Come on, love,” he says. “Don’t be afraid.”

Marianne doesn’t hesitate, this time. Maybe she’s learning the same things he is, steadily: that you can grow up close to the ocean and still never learn what it means to surrender to something, to let something else hold you, until you already have. Until you discover it’s something you already know how to do, like treading water, like breathing.

Claude watches, and waits for her. Her eyes are on his as she draws in that first breath, holds it, and lets herself fall.

**Author's Note:**

> natsuki: hahaha little mermaid au but claude is ariel  
> natsuki: god i can't imagine how hard that would be, writing a claude that can't talk  
> me: ikr the thought is killing me  
> me:  
> me: clearly i must now attempt it
> 
> To be sure there exists on my cutting room floor a long conversation between alt!Marianne and alt!Ferdinand where she stammeringly tells him, completely wracked with guilt, that she _might_ be in love with someone else, only to have him seize her by the hands and exclaim OH HOW ROMANTIC! Meanwhile the Statue(TM) is just there, on the ocean floor, chilling with the crabs.
> 
> I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/strikinglight_) if you'd like to say hello. It's a crazy world out there, and I hope you never lack for stories. Ciao!


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